Google Colab + Losswise

Google Colab

I’ve been using Google Colab for a while now,
if you haven’t checked it out I suggest doing so. It is a great way to run python
notebooks in the cloud, it supports google docs style interactive sharing, and
Google even gives you free shared time on a Nvidia K80 GPU for training (at least
as of May 2018). I use it whenever I need to train models and don’t want to throw
money at the problem Recently I used it for my Sonic Collision Mapping
project.

Losswise

Although colab is great, one of the major downsides is that since you don’t have
direct server access, you can’t easily use Tensorboard to monitor & plot training
performance. This is where Losswise comes in.

Losswise is an easy to use external service that allows you to track model performance
in real time. By installing and setting up the losswise package, you can easily
track your model’s training perfomance on the with the losswise dashboard.

Using losswise is pretty straightforward, the only gotcha is that if you are sharing
a model you probably don’t want your private Losswise API key saved in the notebook.
Instead of hardcoding your Losswise token, it is better to use the python getpass
module to accept it as a secret password field.